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Maybe I'll Pitch Forever: A Great
Baseball Player Tells the Hilarious Story Behind the Legend
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Leroy Robert ("Satchel")
Paige
(1906-1982)
Baseball Pitcher
Leroy Robert ("Satchel")
Paige (1906-1982) --
born in Mobile, Alabama
-- became the first African American pitcher in the
American League when he joined the Cleveland Indians in 1948.
With Paige on the pitcher's mound, the Indians won the 1948
World Series. By 1952 Paige was pitching on the American League
All-Star squad. According to American
ballplayer Dizzy Dean, the greatest pitcher of all time.
He was the sixth child of twelve, which included a
set of twins of John Page, a gardener, and Lulu Coleman
Paige, a domestic and washerwoman.
Leroy Paige earned his nickname as a boy who carried
satchels, or suitcases, at the Mobile train station. At age 12,
Satchel was sent to the Industrial School for Negro Children in
Mount Meigs, Alabama, for shoplifting and truancy from W.C. Council
School. There, he developed his pitching skills.
A Satchel Chronology
1924 -- joined the semi-pro Mobile Tigers.
1926 (May 1) -- made professional pitching debut with the
Chattanooga Black Lookouts of the Negro Southern League.
1928 -- purchased by the Birmingham Black Barons, paid Page a
phenomenal $275.00 a month.
1932 -- jumped from the Black Barons to the Black Sox of
Baltimore to the Nashville Elite Giants and finally the Cleveland
Cubs, before settling with the Crawfords of Pittsburgh
1935 -- teamed with four other future Hall of Famers: Charleston,
Bell, Johnson, and Gibson to win the Crawfords a league
championship.
1937 -- enticed by Dominican Republic dictator, Rafael Trujillo,
along with other prominent stars of the Negro Leagues, to stock his
politically motivated team.
1942 -- became the ace of the Kansas City Monarchs pitching
staff, led them to the Negro World Series, swept Homestead Gray, in
which Page won three of the four contests
1946 -- led Monarchs again to the Negro World Series
1948 -- signed with Bill Veeck, owner of the Cleveland
Indians on his 42nd birthday. A record crowd of 78,383 for a night
game watched Paige make his first major league appearance. In his
first starting role, he drew 72,434 fans in Cleveland's Municipal
Stadium. As the oldest rookie in baseball, he won six times against
one loss, helping the Indians to a pennant and a world series
appearance against the Boston Braves.
1951 -- signed by the lowly St. Louis Browns in 1951, he promptly
signed old Satchel again. Incredibly, the following year,
1952 -- enjoyed one of his finest major league seasons at the age
of 46 with the St. Louis Browns. Won twelve games and was
selected to the All-Star team, achieving another honor as baseball's
oldest selection.
1953-1956 -- with the Miami Marlins, over 50 years old, only
walked 54 batters in 340 innings
1965 -- appeared for three innings with Kansas City Atheletics.
when his two-month contract for $4,000 expired, the 59 year old
legend retired from baseball.
1967 -- pitched his last game
for the Indianapolis Clowns
1971 (August 9) -- became the first player from the Negro Leagues
elected to Cooperstown's National Baseball Hall of Fame. When he
accepted his award, he told the admirers that in the Negro Leagues,
"there were many Satchels and many Joshes."
1982 ( Jume 5) -- made his last public appearance, suffering from
the lingering illness of emphysema. Speaking from a wheelchair, he
graciously received recognition at the dedication of a $250,000
renovated park, to be called the Satchel Paige Memorial Stadium, in
Kansas City, Missouri
1982 (June 8)-- died in Kansas City, Missouri
1991 (October) -- honored with the dedication of a new magnet
school called the Leroy "Satchel" Paige Classical Greek
Academy, which promotes the Greek philosophy of "body and
spirit," symbolizing Paige as one of the most physically
talented and spirited bodies to play the sport.
By his own count, Paige threw 55 no-hitters and won over
2,000 of the 2,500 games he pitched.
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Satchel Philosophy
Never let your head hang down.
Never give up and sit down and grieve.
Find another way.
Ain't no man can avoid being born average, but there ain't no man got to be
common.
Avoid fried foods which anger the
blood.
If your stomach disputes you, lie down and
pacify it with cooling thoughts.
Go very lightly on the vices, such as
carrying on in society -- the social ramble ain't restful, |
Satchel Philosophy
"Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t
matter."
"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."
"Don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines."
"Money and women. They're two of the strongest things in the world. The
things you do for a woman you wouldn't do for anything else. Same with
money."
"Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like nobody's watching."
"Mother always told me, if you tell a lie, always rehearse it. If it don't
sound good to you, it won't sound good to no one else."
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Source: Leroy Satchel Page, et al.
Maybe I'll Pitch Forever: A Great
Baseball Player Tells the Hilarious Story Behind the Legend (1962; 1993).
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Larry
Tye.
Satchel: The Life and Times of an American
Legend (2009)
He is
that rare American icon who has never been
captured in a biography worthy of him. Now,
at last, here is the superbly researched,
spellbindingly told story of athlete,
showman, philosopher, and boundary breaker
Leroy “Satchel” Paige.
Few reliable records or news reports survive
about players in the Negro Leagues. Through
dogged detective work, award-winning author
and journalist Larry Tye has tracked down
the truth about this majestic and enigmatic
pitcher, interviewing more than two hundred
Negro Leaguers and Major Leaguers, talking
to family and friends who had never told
their stories before, and retracing Paige’s
steps across the continent. Here is the
stirring account of the child born to an
Alabama washerwoman with twelve young mouths
to feed, the boy who earned the nickname
“Satchel” from his enterprising work as a
railroad porter, the young man who took up
baseball on the streets and in reform
school, inventing his trademark hesitation
pitch while throwing bricks at rival gang
members. |
Tye shows Paige barnstorming across
America and growing into the superstar hurler of the
Negro Leagues, a marvel who set records so eye-popping
they seemed like misprints, spent as much money as he
made, and left tickets for “Mrs. Paige” that were picked
up by a different woman at each game. In unprecedented
detail, Tye reveals how Paige, hurt and angry when
Jackie Robinson beat him to the Majors, emerged at the
age of forty-two to help propel the Cleveland Indians to
the World Series. He threw his last pitch from a
big-league mound at an improbable fifty-nine. (“Age is a
case of mind over matter,” he said. “If you don’t mind,
it don’t matter.”)
More than a fascinating account of a baseball odyssey,
Satchel rewrites our history of the integration of the
sport, with Satchel Paige in a starring role. This is a
powerful portrait of an American hero who employed a
shuffling stereotype to disarm critics and racists,
floated comical legends about himself–including about
his own age–to deflect inquiry and remain elusive, and
in the process methodically built his own myth. “Don’t
look back,” he famously said. “Something might be
gaining on you.” Separating the truth from the legend,
Satchel is a remarkable accomplishment, as large as this
larger-than-life man.
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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